Javier Hernando
Dómina Esteléctrica
SPAIN GEOMETRIK / MUNSTER RECORDS GR2159 LP (2023)
Excellent solo LP of oneiric, dream-like electronic music from this Spanish veteran performer. Javier Hernando was a member of Xeerox, an important Barcelona group which existed from 1979 to 1981 – their members included Germán Lázaro and Krishna Goineau, but others who passed through were Magda Redondo, Pedro LLorens, Cheity, Raúl Guber, and Luis Lorenzo. I’m not sure if there were any released cassettes or albums from that original period, although a nice retrospective set appeared on CDR in 2008 (later reissued on vinyl by Anomia). There was also a triple-LP survey of the Barcelona scene on which Xeerox appeared, La Ciudad Secreta: The Experimental Sounds Of Barcelona 1971-1991, which sounds fabulous. Hernando later went solo as Melodinamika Sensor (one tape on his own Ortega Y Cassette label in 1983) and Sinusoidal (one release in 1995). We should also mention Toracic Tapes, Miguel A. Ruiz’s cassette label whose reissue programme we’ve been following with much interest in these pages for several years; Hernando released Destellos Mercuriales and Kirliana for them in the 1990s.
While Orfeon Gagarin, Funeral Souvenir and Siegmar Fricke have tended towards the production of intense, alarming and unsettling noises, our man Javier Hernando is I find much more of a poet. Dómina Esteléctrica is an explicit attempt to create a surrealistic, dream-like experience of sleepwalking, a strange narrative about the pursuit of a mysterious woman figure. Accordingly the music, while very nocturnal and occluded, is also oddly benign and compelling, not wishing to break the trance-like spell it is weaving, and so shies away from any violent shocks or off-putting textures. In his notes, Hernando makes very specific references to the work of Mina Loy (the poem Lunar Baedeker), the Cocteau film Orphée, in particular the performance of Spanish-French actress Maria Casares, the painter Remedios Varo and her Spirit of the Night, and a short film by the American Ed Emswhiller called Thanaptosis. Inspired by these fellow visionaries and poets, Hernando creates this delirious concept album of haunting instrumental music using synthesisers and processing, underscores his messages with titles such as ‘Visita de Insomnia’ and ‘La Noche Niega’, and advances his themes of “graphic oneirism”.
The cover artworks are an integral part of it too. The barely-visible spirit woman floating above the water ripples on the front, and the highly-evocative perspective on the back cover, a collage worthy of Dali. “The images of the back cover and front are originated in two frames of the experimental film-maker Hollis Frampton,” Javier tells me, “to which I added more images of forgotten films in the form of a collage made with my wife Azucena de Yngunza and enhanced by my close collaborator Ángel Lalinde.” All of this romantic surrealism is very much in line with Hernando’s Vacuola sent to us in 2022. I see I invoked Joseph Cornell on that occasion, and on today’s sojourn in the Dómina Esteléctrica, I might tentatively add Tom Phillips, who had his own very English take on the elusive mystery-woman figure in “The Quest for Irma”. This did exist as an opera piece, but her presence is just about traceable through the verbal and visual mazes in the pages of A Humument – “I tell you that’s Irma herself.”
In short, this is a very strong and personal artistic statement in sound, not just another concoction of synth noises or dark ambient dronery. Amazingly, this Javier Hernando’s first ever publication in the form of a vinyl LP. From 10 October 2023.